I’ll have to be brief as I’m heading out the door soon for Liverpool, but since my good friend Jerry the Anthropologist and I are hashing my machine talk out in comments with respect to my previous post on machine-oriented ontology, I thought it might be timely to say a word or two about my theory of writing. The poet Artaud famously said that the most difficult thing of all is to engender thought within thought. Thought is not something that comes immediately and automatically to us. Rather, it is the result of an encounter and it requires a genesis. This, I guess, is the theory behind my own practice of writing and my unfortunate word choices (“object”, “machine”, “existential ecology”, etc.). I have an imp of perversity in me. I intentionally choose words that I know will provoke. That provocation is not just a provocation towards whatever readers I might happen to have, but towards myself as well. How can I manage to think? How can I engender thought in myself? It doesn’t come naturally or automatically.
My theory of writing and thinking here is based on a hybrid of Deleuze’s theory of the encounter and Lacan’s theory of the analytic act. Lacanian psychoanalysis perpetually struggles with the sedimentations of the analysand’s discourse or what Bruce Fink calls “ego discourse”. The analysand thinks that he knows what he’s saying, that he knows what his intentions are, but there’s another discourse, the discourse of the Other or the unconscious, lurking behind this belief in the transparency of his ego-discourse and speech. Lacanians don’t really interpret. We never say “x means y” or “this is what your forgetting of the umbrella really meant.” It is always the analysand, not the analyst, that gives meaning. Rather, Lacanians instead interrupt. When they speak, they do so in a way that attends not to the conscious intentions of the analysand’s discourse, but to the polysemy, the homonyms, the equivocations, the gaps, the contradictions, etc., within that discourse. Their acts, not interpretations, both suggest that some other desire might be speaking here, one contrary to your ego discourse, and open the possibility of that other discourse speaking rather than being smothered in narcissistic self-image and the purported transparency of communicative ego discourse. The aim is to upset the unity of discourse so that desire might shine through and began to articulate itself.
read on!
In the third chapter of Difference and Repetition, Deleuze argues that we never think voluntarily or at will, but we only think under the force of what he calls a sentiendum or encounter that forces us to think. He says that the encounter can be a demon, a temple, Socrates, and to this we could add it could result from witnessing Koshimi primates washing potatoes in the ocean before eating them, or the astounding visual capacities of mantis shrimps. An encounter forces thought, upsetting the habits and sedimentations that populate our mind, allowing something new to emerge.
I suspect that something like this is at work in my practice of writing. I am striving to startle and interrupt myself so that I might manage to think. I’m trying to stutter. Harman says writing should not be clear, so much as vivid. Perhaps vivid writing means writing that startles and that therefore manages to engender thought. “Wait, what, did he just say that everything is an object, even persons and animals, and that objects are so withdrawn that they never touch? But I thought objects and objectification are supposed to be bad?” “Wait, wait, wait, did I just entertain the possibility that everything is a machine, that even flowers, stars, and classrooms are machines, that there is a pan-mechanism, and that rigid machines or automobiles are only a very small subset of machines? Aren’t machines supposed to be evil?” The point of language such as this is not that it is right— it could be entirely wrong –but that it interrupts, startles, and causes us to stutter.
Interrupting and startling aren’t to be valued for their own sake as absolutes. If there’s a value to interruption, being startled, and stuttering, if there’s a value to vividness, then this is because it engenders thought within thought and opens the possibility of critique. In Against Method, Feyerabend talks about how it is indispensable for thought to create an alternative universe with crazy and mad laws so as to see this universe. We’re unable to see anything if we don’t do such a thing because our world is so saturated with habit and the obvious that it’s invisible to us. The responsible theorist is a theorist that forges concepts that are dramatic and that crackle, causing us to stutter. In doing this, we become capable of no longer seeing the obvious as obvious, we become capable of seeing the familiar as contingent and historical, we become capable of critiquing assumptions at the heart of our discipline and institutions. The parallel world brings the lived world into relief, while also disclosing it as contingent or capable of being otherwise. This is the real transcendental epoche, a mad pataphysics, that is also the condition for a revolutionary practice. To see the world as a moth so that the obviousness of what we are might begin to stutter and be called into question, that’s what’s important. It’s important to engender thought within thought, and that requires the production of stuttering. And since institutions and disciplines think no less than people, it is equally important to make institutions and disciplines stutter. “For the time being I shall be an object, a zombie, precisely so that I might see what it meant to be human and a subject!”
Words like “object” and “machine” are meant to prickle like gadflies, causing habit to stumble and, with any luck, engendering critical consciousness in practice. Of course they’re chosen because they’re misleading. Yet the strange thing is that such misleading concepts allow truth to show itself, precisely by bringing forth what was before unseen while being right there.
Larval Subjects . 
June 27, 2012 at 9:25 pm
I had an “encounter” yesterday in the Deleuzean sense. First, I went to the Museum to see a friend. But once there, I encountered the new work “Levitated Mass” which is a large, large rock set between the two walls of a man-made concrete trough. And when I first saw it, I saw people in the trough, taking trick-photos of the rock: they were standing in the trough and holding their hands up as though it were they who were holding up the rock.
So that was the encounter. The result: it was a friend’s birthday. The friend is well-known for smoking a pipe. Now, there is a very famous Magritte painting at LACMA, of a pipe. When I encountered this second work, I took a photograph of myself in a trick-photo way, as though I myself were smoking the pipe on the canvas. The photo is only 24 hours old, but already at least a dozen people have sent me their appreciation of it.
I am convinced that I would have never thought of the second photo without first “encountering” the rock and the people who were doing their own trick photo of it. And how many–yes, millions–of people have passed by the Magritte and never thought of taking a photo of themselves “smoking” the pipe? “The possibility that everything is a machine…” indeed!
June 27, 2012 at 10:23 pm
Levi, this is a very timely post as I’m right now in the process of writing an article on my worms project. My purpose in writing the article – at least in part – is to make people think differently about the worms, anthropology, and scientific research in general. I’m not out to explain the bloodworm industry by means of a predictive or generalizing theory, only to describe it in a way that gets people to respond to it differently. I’m running into problems because the professor who is helping me write it doesn’t understand that that’s what I’m doing, and doesn’t see the point of it.
I would be interested to know how your friend Jerry applies OOO and similar approaches to anthropology. In fact, I’d be interested to know how any anthropologist is using OOO. I know what I’m doing, what I want to do, but sometimes I’m not sure I’m going in the right direction.
June 27, 2012 at 10:35 pm
Jerry’s his own beast. Our conversations have influenced me tremendously, but he’s not an OOOer. We’re wonderfully resonant divergent worlds.
June 28, 2012 at 12:58 pm
Jeremy,
Levi is right about what he said about me. I was trained at Virginia (Crocker, Khare, Wagner, McKinnon, Damon), so in a more fluid structuralism than Levi recognizes and a much more ethnographic one as well. One night at dinner with friends I realized that what I’d been talking about for years was a kind of morphology clustered around what I call the relaton between person and world, where at one level the terms are empty or general and at another they can be filled with any set of particulars. To this I added at dissent to Dumont’s use of the idea of encompassed and encompassing (Dumont is closer to Levi’s view of Levi-Strauss than I think Levi-Strauss is). That is I began to find periodically examples of what I call mutual encompassment (in Siwite origin myths where the macrocosm and microcosm are both inside one another, money where use value is exchange value, catholocism (very lower case c) where G-d become man and man becomes G-d). These are like Levi-Strauss’ north-south axis in Bororo villages, that s they are so the field around them exists…see Crocker’s work. I grew up in SEAsia and west Africa (foreign service brat) and thus come to anthropology very naturally. But growing up that way also led me to follow G Bateson up a hill and M Mead to embodied culture initially in Bali and then back inro the sciences they grew up in, pracited and founded all on my way back to highland Bali.
So what’s going on with these worms? I’m reasonably sure Levi wouldn’t mind if we conversed here just a bit.
J
June 29, 2012 at 4:47 pm
Nicely said.
Although of course the interrupting and startling can themselves become habit, even when sincerely yoked for the purposes you describe. Then perhaps the plodding becomes the antidote.
In my meditation practice I was taught that it is a fault not to apply the antidote to an obstacle to meditation, but it also a fault to apply an antidote when there is no obstacle. So the situation of the overall discourse is also an important factor.
June 30, 2012 at 10:40 pm
Jerry,
Thanks for the response, it sound like a very interesting approach – do you have any publications I could read on it?
What I’m working on is a project involving bloodworms – shipped to the Chesapeake region as live bait, and bringing with them several potentially invasive species. The goal of the project is to find ways to prevent that from happening. Although this project was initially conceived without any theory (because we were contracted into it by a team of biologists) I tend to follow Stengers, Latour, John Law, and others in a cosmopolitical approach (and I think Levi falls into this category as well, and I’ve certainly used some of his concepts as well). In other words, for me, the process of anthropological research is an intervention or interruption, as Levi describes above, aimed at collaboratively recomposing a set of relations and practices between beings (human and non). So I think of anthropological research methods (PO, interviewing, surveying, etc.) as well as the process of building rapport and engaging with a community as part of that process of composing relationships. I also think of writing up ethnographic material in the same way. So I would use the opportunity to write an article as an opportunity to frame the issue in a particular way that gets people to think differently – about the specific topic, and about anthropology in general. For example, in this article, I’ve chosen to depict the issue as the result of heterogeneous relationships and practices between different beings (human and non). I’ve done this to highlight the complexity of these relationships and the active participation of non-humans in their composition. I see this as being akin to the onto-cartography that Levi and Michael talk about – referring to it as an ecological approach (and thus a sort of renewal of “ecological anthropology”).
What I’m running into, though, is a difference in conception of theory. For me theory is something that situates me with respect to the beings that I’m studying. It tells me how to engage with those beings, how to go about representing them to others, and what it will take to compose a change in the relationships (assuming a change is necessary). However, for my adviser and other anthropologists I’ve talked with, theory is taken in the scientific sense. It’s a causal statement A=B, which can be used to predict or make generalizations once it’s been validated. So when I produce my onto-cartography or ecology, it’s not taken for an intervention or interruption as I intend it, but rather as merely descriptive, and thus useless because it doesn’t further scientific knowledge. I don’t know if the solution to this is to push my conception of theory so that it becomes more widely accepted, or to abandon it and try to find some kind of predictive, generalizing theory within my approach.
So that’s a long explanation of the issue. I’d be glad to hear your thoughts on this – or those of other anthropologists, geographers, psychologists, sociologists or other researchers working with this kind of theory. If it gets to be too much to discuss here, we can talk on my website as well, or by email.
Thanks,
Jeremy
July 1, 2012 at 2:13 pm
Hi Jeremy,
First, my thanks to Levi for letting us do this here.
When I was in grad school I did two very useful things, both of them by accident. My ex transferred from UVa to Cornell and I went with her. In doing so I got away from my advisors and had to begin to think my own thought. Second, I asked my ex to read part of my diss one day. She became angry at all the pomo jargon. I rewrote the entire thing in English, plain English. The work was much better, much smarter, after that.
You might benefit from doing something similar.
I also remember something Crocker said about his book, Vital Souls. He said all the theory was well inside or underneath his prose. You might benefit from not thrusting the theory onto these folks so much. You are unlikely to change their approach, their conception of science.
May I suggest that you look at an old paper by Mead, The Comparative Study of Culture and the Purposive Cultivation of Democratic Values. You’ll find it in the volume of papers which came out of the Second Symposium on Science, Philosophy and Religion published in 1942. Look at how she distinguished social sciences from natural sciences; also at the way she conceives the relations between means and ends. You needn’t agree with her or cite her, but you may find her useful.
I would also read Pigs for the Ancestors with an eye to determing what Rappaport got wrong and why he then had to turn his attention much more seriously to ritual. He’s been very important in Oceania. Remember, in anth these days we no longer read the same things…pity, really.
Finally I would look at two parts of Anna Tsing’s work. In the Realm of the Diamond Queen, all of it but especially the section where Tsing takes down the list of living things from Uma Adang and others. Second, from Friction Tsing’s concept of friction and her discussion of maps/scaling/models. These you should be able to develop.
You might also look at Houseman and Severi’s book Naven or the Other Self. Its a general theory of ritual as interactive which takes off from Bateson’s Naven…the pre-cybernetic Bateson. But if you bear in mind the processes by which order is produced and reproduced, you may find that useful.
I do not know your profs, but my guess is they see you as doing something they would understand as applied anthropology. Applied has been the weak sister of the rest of anth for a long time. Note also, they are largely right about the older versions of ecological anthropology (Steward, Harris and that lot). They were very boring and often wrong, hence the importance of Rappaport and Tsing for anything going forward. You might also want to take a look at Gary Witherspoon work on Navaho understanding of landscape and Donald Sutton’s lovely book Remembrances of Repasts.
I don’t know whether its really feasible to write from the suposed vantage of the blood worms. But you should be able to write a multiplicity of ecologies, particularly if you can get friction and memory (per Sutton) going together.
My own published work is almost entirely historical, but see my article in The Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences in 2004 and the two articles in Pacific Studies 2005 and 2009 if you like. I’ve been working on understanding how Mead came to develop her morphological approach. There is also a chapter in Janiewski and Banner’s volume Reading Mead/ Reading Benedict from 2004.
You’ll find the stuff on mutual encompassment in my diss, entitled Bali as It Might Have Been Known:Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, Wolfgang Weck, Schizophrenia and Human Agency, UVa 1998, especially the chapters 5 (The Autocosmic Body as a Balinese Morphology of Experience) and 6 (Spirits of the Land, Spirits of Predecessors, Spirits of Affliction) though you’ll also have to look at the last section of chapter Four entitled “Bodies becoming Bodies becoming Bodies or Three Bodies of Bali.” I should have these on a disk somewhere if you are interested. Don’t go paying UMI for the diss.
I’m working on a book to be entitled The Making of Balinese Character. All this stuff will make an appearance there.
I would suggest you keep two things especially in mind: (1) the topologies of force which form the field which is the Bay (note here that per Kohler, the gestalt psychology) the whole is different (not more) than the some of its parts and hence appears different from different angles within the field and (2) that you said you need theory to orient yourself.
My email is gsullivan@collin.edu. Let me know if I can be of help or if you would like some clarification.
Also note a difference between Levi and myself. He wants a great big machine of machines. I’m devoted to a notion of a giant nervous system coming into its own.
Jerry
July 1, 2012 at 2:32 pm
Building on Jerry’s great remarks, he’s spot on about theories. Labels such as (“ooo”, “deconstruction”, etc) establish territories and can be polarizing. Jerry and I are generally on the same page theoretically– I share his cybernetic structuralism –but it took me a while to see this because the label “structuralism” was getting in this way. Concepts can operate in empirical research without having to be polemically foregrounded. Remember also that the signifier is arbitrary. Endnotes can be your friend with these issues.
July 2, 2012 at 3:00 am
Thanks Levi and Jerry, for the advice and recommendations. I probably could use some work on the jargon. I wasn’t initially going to write so much about theory for this article – I was only going to write a brief ethnographic article on the bloodworm harvesters – but my professor thought it was important that I emphasize the theory. He might be right on that. In any case, his concept of theory is different from mine, and that makes it difficult to communicate. Just something I’ll have to work with.
I’ll take a look at your suggested readings, Jerry. I’m pretty familiar with prior approaches in environmental/ecological anthropology, and I really like Bateson. I’ve been meaning to read some of Tsing’s work, and the others you mention sound interesting. I’ll be in touch – it would be helpful to talk with someone who’s familiar with this kind of theory and see how it can be used.
July 2, 2012 at 2:19 pm
Jeremy,
Don’t forget the longue duree. The Bay itself and its wayershed make some things possible and others very unlikely. Its not like Puget Sound which acts like an airconditioner. The Chesapeake is shallow and swampy….but you know all that. Good luck. Let us know how things work out.
Jerry